The Emperor's Webway project...

[anyone4tea?]

Fascinating stuff!

Other than the Humans and Eldar, do any other races use the webway? Is there any possibility of another race invading the Imperium from it after sneaking in? That would be an awesome campaign.

[Athlan na Dyr]

And that's the Imperium's biggest secret: the human Webway is accessible and intact. Only the ancient families of the Navis Nobilae know this, as they helped the Emperor create it; and its existence would greatly reduce the Imperium's need of them, thus crippling their wealth and influence.

IT'S A CONSPIRACY, MAN!!!

Exactly! All the Daemons trying to break in are just from Warp Daycare and want the Emperor to collect Lorgar already

Fascinating stuff!

Other than the Humans and Eldar, do any other races use the webway? Is there any possibility of another race invading the Imperium from it after sneaking in? That would be an awesome campaign.

The Necrons (or newcrons). Which is a pity as normal Faster than Light travel was a boatload more awesome then hacking into the webway

[Orthodox]

This may be only a small point, but don't the thoughts and dreams of people traversing the warp create instant mirror-ghosts of their thoughts.... deamons if you like, around them?
That's the impression I got from some stories involving navigators and the like, and I think these creatures born through warptravel, even if most of them perish when the ship (the creatures source) passes away, populate the warp with

This is compelling.

a "new" kind of deamon whom are more connected to the physical world because they were born through a human thought or dream directly and not just diffuse emotions, watered down with the translation through the space/warp barrier, and would therefore feel more need to return to this physical realm.

No translation is required through a space/warp barrier. Those "diffuse emotions" emanate from a soul that exists in the warp as a cartesian complement to an person's corporeal existence.

[Todorius]

What about how they will even be able to access previously 'undiscovered' world if the webway portal has a portal there, also there is a chance that the portals lead to some other alien infested worlds such as an ork held world. They could use the webway to explore the world which could not be reached conventionally using warp travel and could launch massive surprise assaults on whatever world that is near a portal.

[Bonzai]

What is the Emperor's overall objective? To calm the warp, and return it to its simpler, "purer" state. To do this, he needs to stop sentient life from fueling the chaos gods.

Step 1: unite Mankind under his rule. The subtle approach didnt work out, but it did serve to seed mankind across the galaxy.

Step 2: convert mankind to the Imperial "truth". Now that you have conquered Terra, you need to mold mankind into the ideal society. Logic, science, and reason become the new "Gods" to humanity.

Step 3: conquer or subvert the galaxy. Now comes the crusade. Kill all the Xenos (they are largely responsible for this mess anyways), assimilate or wipe out wayward human colonys, and begin to starve the warp of emotions to feed on.

Step 4: remove all avenues for chaos to gain a foothold. The catch was that the Imperium is reliant on psykers. Without warp travel, it will unravel all over again. So he finds an alternative. This will allow him to maintain an iron grip on humanity, eliminate the need for psykers, and spell the death knell for the chaos gods.

At that point, mission accomplished. The warp is tamed, and it will usher in a return to the "golden" age. That was the plan anyways, but he grossly underestimated the
Chaos gods.

[ManOfRust]

It does make you wonder why the Emperor didn't build his webway project FIRST before the surely more resource intensive process of conquering the Galaxy. Secure the Solar System first, sure, but why spend 200 years exposing your forces to the warp and alien cultures when you could just do an SG1.

[Artinam]

Maybe he was busy with it, but took 200 years to complete.

[Idaan]

Upthread it is mentioned that hostile Chaos entities are unable to attack beings inside the Webway. Is this true? Are psychics able to use their powers inside the Webway? If yes, then it becomes an order of magnitude more useful than I thought!

Yes. This is why Commorragh is in the Webway: Slaanesh can't drain the Dark Eldar souls while they're inside of it.

Yep, it was Magnus. Not fully awake when I typed that.
The Imperial Webway was the man-made section that was joining in with the full network, made with human effort and technology.

Not entirely, see below.

It does make you wonder why the Emperor didn't build his webway project FIRST before the surely more resource intensive process of conquering the Galaxy. Secure the Solar System first, sure, but why spend 200 years exposing your forces to the warp and alien cultures when you could just do an SG1.

Probably he didn't think it possible before finding the Golden Throne, and it occured later:

He thought he had known better than his father how to wield the power of the Great Ocean. He believed he was its master, but in the ruins of his father’s great work, he had seen the truth. The Golden Throne was the key. Unearthed from forgotten ruins sunken deep beneath the driest desert, it was the lodestone that would have unlocked the secrets of the alien lattice. Now it was in ruins, its impossibly complex dimensional inhibitors and warp buffers fused beyond salvage.

Yeah, the Emperor's great work wasn't really his own work.

[KingDeath]

One has to wonder how any imperial webway project should have succeeded when even the Eldar have lost control and knowledge of large swaths of the webway.

[MyNameDidntFit]

Ever had a really big project that you just couldn't be bothered getting around to? Yeah. The Big E was procrastinating.

[El_Machinae]

In the Thousand Sons, Magnus states that the Emperor had found it 'decades ago'. So, it's more of a recent finding

[TrooperTino]

This is compelling.



No translation is required through a space/warp barrier. Those "diffuse emotions" emanate from a soul that exists in the warp as a cartesian complement to an person's corporeal existence.

I thought what exists in the warp of you while living is dependant on your connection to the warp, your psy-level or however one likes to call it. A psyker has a strong presence in the warp, while a normal human has a low presence and a tau has nearly none. All three a sentient, living beeings, all are able to feel emotions like strong hatred or love but one of them has nearly no presence in the warp. One can say the tau has no "soul" but I think the only difference here is the possibility to have psykers, a "psyker-gene" if you like or a more metaphorical "warp-connection" that is there or not. The normal humans emotions doesn't translate fully into the warp, only a small fraction of it. That's just my opinion, but iff every sentient being has a cartesian complement in the warp, why have some bigger and other smaller "astral-personas"? The barrier between warp and realspace is there, but when you travel in a gellar field through the warp you traversed this barrier and people with an otherwise small warp-footprint fuel the warp more directly.

[Juggernaut101]

And that's the Imperium's biggest secret: the human Webway is accessible and intact. Only the ancient families of the Navis Nobilae know this, as they helped the Emperor create it; and its existence would greatly reduce the Imperium's need of them, thus crippling their wealth and influence.

IT'S A CONSPIRACY, MAN!!!

I knew it

In the Thousand Sons, Magnus states that the Emperor had found it 'decades ago'. So, it's more of a recent finding

Really? Damn, I need to stay more up to date on the HH novels ... I always thought the Emperor build the damn thing.

Juggernaut

[sweave]

i think originally he told dorn how to create it after his fight with horus.
now it seems to have existed beforehand and was repurposed as a life support chair

[Orthodox]

I thought what exists in the warp of you while living is dependant on your connection to the warp, your psy-level or however one likes to call it. A psyker has a strong presence in the warp, while a normal human has a low presence and a tau has nearly none. All three a sentient, living beeings, all are able to feel emotions like strong hatred or love but one of them has nearly no presence in the warp. One can say the tau has no "soul" but I think the only difference here is the possibility to have psykers, a "psyker-gene" if you like or a more metaphorical "warp-connection" that is there or not. The normal humans emotions doesn't translate fully into the warp, only a small fraction of it. That's just my opinion, but iff every sentient being has a cartesian complement in the warp, why have some bigger and other smaller "astral-personas"? The barrier between warp and realspace is there, but when you travel in a gellar field through the warp you traversed this barrier and people with an otherwise small warp-footprint fuel the warp more directly.

A Tau has negligible presence in the immaterium, but he also has negligible presence in the materium. The species are not physically imposing, their lives average under 30 years, and they are born into their careers with no option to transition, for example, from engineering into business. A non-psyker's displacement in the warp may be a reflection of his displacement in reality as enable by talent, physique, health, charisma, social positon, et al.

Psychic phenomena occur when the material and immaterial persons are mismatched, so a frail, anonymous under-hive peon can accomplish more than his health and test scores would indicate if his swollen warp-displacement manifests as fireballs and precognition. The minor psychic power tables included a "no power" result that described the psyker as preternaturally good at cards, etc, but not otherwise empowered. Conversely, a warp presence to small for her body and intellect prevented famous pariah A Bequin from consummating or even expressing romantic tension with Inq. Eisenhorn, despite physical and emotional attraction.

After all, magic in any sense is just a mismatch between what ought rationally to happen and what actually does. Let me turn your question around. Why invent differently sized warp-persons if they are not going to mean anything?

[Bonzai]

A Tau has negligible presence in the immaterium, but he also has negligible presence in the materium. The species are not physically imposing, their lives average under 30 years, and they are born into their careers with no option to transition, for example, from engineering into business. A non-psyker's displacement in the warp may be a reflection of his displacement in reality as enable by talent, physique, health, charisma, social positon, et al.

I've always speculated that part of the reason that the Tau present such a small warp signature was their slavish devotion to the greater good. That, and the alleged Etherial phermones acts like airborn Riddlin for the entire race. They are more or less sedated, and conditioned to put aside personal ambition for the betterment of their race as a whole. Without strong personal emotion or feelings, there is very little resonance in the warp.

It makes sense if you subscribe to Xenology as cannon, and that the Etherials were engineered by the Eldar. If some Farseer decided that they needed a cannon fodder race to serve as a buffer between some Eldar worlds, and say..... a Hive Fleet coming in from the Eastern Fringe, then engineering the Tau would make some sense. The Eldar wouldn't want to recreate the mistakes of the Old Ones and create unforseen backlashes like the Enslaver plague. They would want to create a race that wouldn't fuel the Great Adversary. They would want a race that has as small a warp foot print as possible. It also gives them an advantage against them, should things turn sour and they come to blows.

Slightly off topic, but I always found it interesting. The Tau could be the Eldar's secret weapon on the war against Chaos.

[El_Machinae]

Really? Damn, I need to stay more up to date on the HH novels ... I always thought the Emperor build the damn thing.

Later on in the book (currently re-reading it), it says that some of the components took 'centuries to build'. So, we just don't know how long ago the Emperor of Man started working on the thing

[ChaplainCharlie]

I thought the web way was safer, but actually slower than Warp travel. Well the actual moving speed at least. However, with increased accuracy comes speed as the ships will be hundreds of thousands of miles off target at best with Warp and the time it takes to move in sublight to correct makes it "faster" to use the web way.

Also, the Warp allows for better Deus Ex Machina solutions when the Imperial reinforcements either get lost for a century or then appear almost as soon as they left on the other side of the galaxy, relieving Imperial worlds either during the crisis they were summoned to deal with or reclaim the world decades after it was lost... XD

[insectum7]

The Webway doesn't connect all worlds, so even if humans had reliable access to it they wouldn't necessarily forego their current method of travel.

There are also Eldar running around inside it, and they're mean.

[Killgore]

The Webway doesn't connect all worlds, so even if humans had reliable access to it they wouldn't necessarily forego their current method of travel.

There are also Eldar running around inside it, and they're mean.

If the Emperor can repair the terran sections of the webway whos to say he lacked the power and knowhow to build new entrances to previously cut off worlds.

I bet the portal beneath his throne was just a workers entrance until he had the infrastructure in place to open a highway entrance somewhere more accessible on Earth.